But over the last decade, Mac gaming has been a frustrating experience. There
aren't that many games ported to the Mac, and you usually have to order the
titles online or buy them at an Apple Store. Plus, Apple couldn't have cared
less about making Macs a better platform for gaming. Still, I soldiered on,
playing Call of Duty and Aliens Vs. Predator II and having a great time, thank
you very much.

Now comes the news that Aspyr is building a href="http://www.twitchguru.com/2006/07/18/aspyrs_gamerhood_takes_aim_at_mac_gam
ing/">digital download store for Mac games. Aspyr, which specializes in
porting many popular PC games to the Mac, plans on releasing Gamerhood, a free
application that will serve as a sort of iTunes for games, later this year.
Apsyr says the price point will be the same as retail versions of the game, but
at the very least Gamerhood will increase the availability of Mac games and make
it a whole lot more convenient to purchase them. Aspyr also says it plans on
having around 15 major titles ready for Gamerhood by the launch date, whichis
schedule for the fall. Current big sellers for the Mac include Call of Duty 2,
Civilization IV and The Sims 2: Nightlife expansion pack.

Considering the rampant rumors about games coming to the iPod (see Aaron's post
below), we may be seeing a renaissance for Mac gaming in the very near future. I
can only hope...

The $5.4 billion deal broadens AMD's product portfolio and helps the company's
goal of unseating Intel as the world's biggest chip company. To use a sports
analogoy, this is a little like Phil Mickelson/Vijay Singh upping their golf
game to challenge Tiger Woods after so many years of so many years of Tiger's
dominance. As for ATI, becoming part of AMD should help it put pressure on its
chief rival Nvidia.

Some folks are cheering the acquisition, while others are complaining that AMD
paid too much for ATI. I don't really know much about stock prices, and I don't
trust the Wall Street analysts anyway. So here's what I do know: at my previous
job covering IT for a biz magazine, I talked to computer resellers, white box
makers, and system builders all the time, and the consensus opinion was that AMD
was out-playing Intel in the innovation game over the last couple years. A
number of system builders I spoke with regularly (who were big Intel shops, BTW)
often said that Intel couldn't touch AMD's 64 performance. However, Intel's size
and market position gave it the ability to offer lower prices and better support.

Will the chip market dynamics change with the AMD-ATI marriage? We shall
see...

It's official: The Nintendo DS pw0ns. Since its launch on November 21 2004, over 21 million Nintendo DS's have been sold worldwide - 23 systems per minute, or one unit every two seconds, as Nintendo pointed out in an ever modest press release.

"In comparison," Nintendo's PR hacks tell us, "Apple shipped one million of its ever-popular iPod music players in its first 19 months."

"We're thrilled to be announcing this milestone today," says George Harrison, Nintendo of America's senior vice president of spin, hype and corporate ego masturbation, "especially since Nintendo DS was North America's top-selling video game system of any type in June. We attribute this success to Nintendo's overall strategy of offering something for everyone - from five-year-olds caring for their Nintendogs to 65-year-olds tuning their mental agility with Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day."

Is it just me or did he just tell 65 year olds that they'd better be playing Brain Age or they'll go senile? Shock, horror, someone get Jack Thompson quick; tell him he's going senile!

The Nintendo DS shall continue to dominate, I dare say, now that the DS Lite has been released - and even existing DS owners are buying into that - and will be paired up with the upcoming Wii which, if there is any Good Lord overlooking the gaming world, will be a success.

Meanwhile, Sony's PlayStation Portable continues its more technologically advanced slide into the annals of history.

According to a recent Ipsos MORI poll in the UK, three in five 11 - 16 year olds are in favour of using video games in the classroom. I'll let Eurogamer break down the numbers for you, but suffice to say this is a bit of legitimacy/ego pleasure for the video game industry.

"Using video games to teach kids," goes the theory "makes it a more legitimate entertainment form." Sure, why not? There are however a couple of major flaws in this plan. Speaking as a chap who has worked with and around kids of various ages in recent times, here are my reasons why educating kids with video games is extremely difficult (not impossible, but the word "difficult" introduced into the vernacular of any publicly funded education system is read as "impossible", for various reasons we won't go into here.)

• Most of the games used in education are crap. Kids, from 4 to 14 and up, are not stupid. If you present them with a sub-par game, which many of the current educational crop are, then they will not want to engage with it. These are kids with PlayStations, Xbox's and PC's at home - they know what a current title should play like, and they expect the kind of high production values they see in their games at home. Even if the play is good the game has to look the biz.
• Good games aren't used intentionally. Gaming being a hot potato issue, any educaters wanting to use video games to teach have to jump several hurdles of perception with parents. Therefore any games that remind mommy and daddy of GTA, even from a graphical point of view, is off the cards. These games also cost more money, and harkening back to the previous point the educators prefer the cheap and cheerful games that look too innocent to attract any heat over something that the kids might actually enjoy - and therefore become engaged with.
• Educational games are too obviously educational. The best way to learn is to do it when you're having fun. Indeed, that's the very idea behind educating through gaming. However most, if not all, educational games have a very direct and obvious educational slant which kids will pick up on immediately, and then they'll switch off. Games have to be fun first, educational second - for example, a Civilization player can tell you quite a bit about the industrial revolution that he or she certainly didn't glean from a long forgotten text book. Of course if you let kids run wild with Civilization then there may be a few questions asked at the next PTA meeting.
• Games aren't being used to teach the right things. Games can substitute for text books in teaching facts and figures, but they are not used by educators to teach the other things that one can learn from playing a video game. Tetris is an extremely simplistic example of this - it's not considered an educational game, yet it is a great training tool for the mind in logic and problem solving. Bearing in mind that the objective of the near universally dreaded advanced maths taught in schools is to teach logic and problem solving more so than ensuring that we have a population that can solve for X, well you see the benefits of fun video games which teach these same fundamental skills.

I'm sure it's an argument that will rage on. I'm all for the idea of using video games to teach kids, but I can't see it happening until at least parents, teachers, administrators and politicians are of a gaming generation who can understand and properly exploit gaming for the purpose of education.

Until then, kids will have to put up with another bore of a class when yet another sub-par game tries to teach them their 7 times tables with crap graphics, a basic interface and absolutely no relation to the cutting edge, immensely fun games they enjoy at home.

The Associated Press Stylebook is one of the major tomes by which publications ensure that their style for using terms and phrases common and vague is consistent across the board. For example, does a publication use "videogame" or "video game". Both are technically correct, but you only want to use one variation in your publication for consistency.

Well, the new edition of the AP Stylebook says that it's video game. It also recognises the Game Boy, as Kotaku's band of scribes figured out. I'm not going to make any jokes about reading the AP Stylebook being akin to reading the dictionary, as technically we're supposed to do both as journalists. This is however akin to having a word put into the dictionary (a good dictionary, mind you) and now we can rejoice as the word Game Boy is no longer taboo or rife with inconsistency across the board of the AP-using media.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm just going to go and pepper my articles with the word "GameBoy", minus the space if you'll notice. I have some wax in my ear, and the most cost effective way to get rid of it is to pick up the phone to a blast of expletives most definitely not in the stylebook, issued by an irate and ever suffering copy editor.

So, the ultra-realistic World War II mod cum full blown video game that is Red Orchestra is going to have one of the ever popular free week of play on Steam. Better than any mere limited demo, the Steam system allows Valve to unlock any game for free to all users for a period of time - they've done it a couple of times with Day of Defeat.

The occasion for this free week, which will run from August 2^nd through August 7^th, is the release of the booster pack for the game - also free, unlike those shoddy ones we have to pay mint for on Battlefield 2 - which will have new weapons, including smoke grenades, and a new map. Again this is something that is being done with Day of Defeat, with new maps and modes of play coming free over Steam.

This is how you nurture a multiplayer game to its full potential - add to it over time. The Battlefield series has always had it, with some candy coming with most patches - indeed, Battlefield 1942 needed to do it so as we no longer had the Japanese driving German vehicles - and the whole foundation of most independent mods is to release early and constantly update the game. Given the ease of the Steam distribution system the whole thing is made all the easier.

If publishers like EA could now only get over their obsession with charging for everything and ditch these stupidly small and expensive "booster packs" for Battlefield 2, of which we're now on our second, the world might be a marginally better place. Charging for an expansion to a multiplayer game only works if nearly everyone then buys said expansion, something that is very rare - you'd be hard pressed to find a great number of servers running said expansions.

If you release an add-on for a multiplayer game then, no matter how cool the content, it will only work if a lot of people play it. There's no point in making the expansion and not selling it as giving it away for free - at least in the latter case you have leverage for reaching new audiences, keeping existing ones for in-game advertising purposes and so on.

Nintendo of America vice president of marketing and corporate communications, Perrin Kaplan, said in an interview when asked whether or not the Wii will be region free (rhyme!) or not, he said "We will share a lot of ways people can play globally, regionally, without boundaries. You're right that the region-free approach has proved to be a successful and attractive feature for Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection on Nintendo DS - we have even blown the doors off our own anticipated numbers! Cost, ease-of- use and player privacy are the three things that were a focus for us with Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection. Those priorities also will apply to the Wii system."

That's an ambiguous "maybe". Hell, anything these communication and marketing guys say that's not then written down and signed in blood to be sealed in a Papal tomb is ambiguous, but this is interesting. However Nintendo is not new to freeing up its platforms, as the DS is region free.

Well, we'll wait and see... importers could be the big winners in this next round of console wars.

The console makers are on to a winner with these so called "micro transactions", providing relatively cheap add on content for games via digital download. Microsoft's Xbox Live Marketplace is the first example we've seen get released into the wild, with people buying credit (and that's a critical part of the equation) for people to spend on items ranging from wallpapers to customise their console to add on maps and items for games.

Some of the stuff, like the Oblivion horse armour for example, has received a mixed reception from gamers. However they have been spending their credit, and Call of Duty publisher Activison has reported that they have sold almost $1 million in expansion maps for CoD 2, the most played multiplayer game on Xbox Live.

That's a serious amount of ongoing revenue intake, but the really surprising thing is that people have also been spending their credits to purchase things that, in the past, PR and marketing types would pay you to take. Things like wallpapers, to "customise" your desktop, can only be provided through the Xbox Live Marketplace, and so it is a sellers market. People have been literally buying promotional materials - only, when you spend "1000 credits" as opposed to "$12.50" it makes the medicine go down that bit easier.

Of course, a stingy person might point out that in games like Day of Defeat: Source and Red Orchestra we're getting bonus materials just as good as the Call of Duty map packs for free. Indeed, there was a time (once upon a better time...) when we got map packs for free. EA have tried selling smaller expansions for PC games, like the Battlefield 2 booster packs, and the exercise has largely been a failure. It seems that this sort of success story for publishers will only work in the highly managed, "sellers market", of something like the Xbox Live Marketplace or Sony's upcoming answer on the PlayStation 3.

The MMORPG Second Life has been living up to its namesake for many, with various groups even hosting concerts there; and now one of the worlds more prodigious PR firms, Text 100, is setting up a virtual office within the game world.

Second life allows users to create their own objects and world, being a very free-form game in which real currency can change hands for everything from real estate to BDSM kit. Now Text 100 have moved a business arm into the world in order to "work with clients on how Second Life may benefit their businesses by facilitating virtual press conferences or new ways of demonstrating products to employees or customers." The firm is also hoping to conduct staff training in the complex which features a welcome centre, an amphitheatre, and information centre.

"We view virtual worlds as the next stage in the evolution of peer-to-peer media like blogs, wikis, social networks and other online forums," said Georg Kolb, EVP, and leader of the peer media practice at Text 100. "Having a presence in Second Life will enable us to explore, innovate, educate and collaborate on a next generation communications platform."

Can't say I wouldn't mind a job at said virtual office...

The Xbox was a modders dream after it was cracked, enabling the console to be used for anything from pirated games to a file server. In the wake of this Microsoft had promised us that the Xbox 360 would be secured "at the silicon level", apparently making it very difficult to crack and the results even more difficult to replicate on multiple consoles.

Well in South Korea they're reporting a booming trade in modified Xbox 360's which allows copied discs to be played in the consoles DVD player, and Microsoft has gone from talking up its vaunted security to downplaying the piracy. The company is promising to fix any bugs such as this with patches and updates pushed through Xbox Live, reminding me somewhat of Sony's farcical ongoing back-and-forth with the homebrew crowd on the PlayStation Portable. One would crack the system, the other would release a patch, this would be cracked a few weeks later, another patch, rinse and repeat.

At the moment times are good for South Korean pirates, where the modification costs around KRW 70,000 (60 Euro); and pirated software is said to be readily available for as little as KRW 15,000 (12 Euro), compared to the standard retail price of around KRW 40,000 (33 Euro), says Gamesindustry.biz.

...Though we're told there won't be any cheap Sony copycat attempts with motion sensitivity just yet.

This is the news that Microsoft will be (hopefully) releasing a separate extra controller for the Xbox 360 which will replace the already much lauded standard one for the purpose of playing first- person shooters; a genre of games not immediately suited to a console controller even as good as the 360's one.

If it is introduced, the new controller will have a redesigned right analogue stick (the equivalent of a mouse in most console control systems) to allow for more precise movements, we're told.

What Microsoft won't be doing quite so immediately is releasing, or even announcing, anything to do with motion sensitivity. To heck, let Nintendo chart that ground and Sony make themselves look like a bunch of eejits I say.

There was one surprise over the weekend. According to news reports, someone
smuggled two live rattlesnakes into a movie theater in Phoenix during a
screening of "Snakes on a Plane" and let the reptiles loose among the audience.
Panic ensued, but luckily no one was hurt. The culprits, however, have yet to be
identified or apprehended. Now, I'm not saying that the rattlers were a
publicity stunt and that New Line is responsible. I'm just saying I wouldn't be
surprised; the movie's called "Snakes on a Plane," for crying out loud.

Microsoft XNA (no, that's not an acronym, it's a load of crap) is the toolset which Microsoft is pushing for development of Windows and Xbox 360 games, providing game developers with a common standard to allow them to not have to worry about the "nuts and bolts boilerplate coding."

As well as giving this platform to developers, Microsoft has recently flung open the doors to homebrew developers on the PC and - critically - the Xbox 360. This will allow the bedroom coder crowd to develop on XNA.

But will they? I don't think so. The mod community which has been around since the days of Quake, and which exploded after the release of Half-Life in 1998, is much better at taking a complex developed game (we'll call it a platform) and reshaping it, rather than designing something from the ground up.

Generally speaking the amateur game developers who have designed their products from the ground up have suffered greatly in terms of what they finally manage to produce. Having to worry about everything from the game engine up costs mainstream developers a lot of time and money, and for amateur developers it can be a prolonged nightmare.

This is even so for mainstream developers - most developers simply buy a third party engine to run their games, essentially making them more professional mod squads. The Doom and Unreal engines are the current big wigs, and before that you couldn't fire up a World War II shooter that wasn't made in the Quake III engine.

Microsoft is throwing open its platform to allow for development, but in reality I think that it will be developers who will be messing around with XNA, not modders. Mod squads are at their most successful taking a game like Half-Life 2 and twisting it around to their ends.

The word "convergence" has become a bit of a dirty one in the tech world, thanks to rather crap attempts to take every device known to man and stuff it into a handheld device that doesn't have very much battery life. In the New Media world however, the word might find new and productive meaning.

MySpace and Snocap (alright, so not Napster, it's just made by a bunch of the same guys) are jumping into bed together to provide music ("and maybe more..." Ohh God, that sounds like a midnight sex chat ad on the telly) to the fawning young masses.

The idea is that "if we want to crack the youngsters, we have to do it on their ground and on their terms", meaning that youngens will be far more likely to buy your stuff if it's sold to them on MySpace or Bebo than traditional outlets.

This entry should really be titled "I feel like I'm getting old", but I'm not self centred enough to take up a whole headline to tell you that. The guts of a paragraph will do. The reason? Because I'm so disconnected from this Bebo generation, and for the first time I feel like an old man in the technology world. Kids (I mean about 12 and up) are using sites like MySpace and Bebo to the extent that, like mobile phones, everyone has a profile and is to be found on one of these two social networking sites.

They're using them as cheap text messaging services and putting videos and pictures up on the web thanks to the simple interfaces offered by sites like YouTube. There's a whole debate about how dangerous this may be to said youngens, but that's another days discussion. For now, let's just accept that it's happening.

So I feel old because I'm watching as 12, 14, 16 year olds who would have derided anyone openly capable of switching on a computer, let alone being able to touch type, just a few short years ago; now just about as tech savvy as anyone really needs to be to get by in the modern day and age, if not more so besides. It has kinda crept up on me - we in the tech sector have been observing it from a distance, but it's different to sit down next to a 14 year old hammering away with a Bebo page and six MSN windows onscreen.

Back to New Media Convergence, if you please. Now that everyone in the hard- to-reach young demography is on social networking sites, New Media Convergence can happen. We already see it with, for example, Bebo integrating YouTube to such a simple extent that it's a matter of pushing a few buttons to get a stock video on your page; and just a few more after that to get your own cam/phone/whoknowswhatelse vids online.

Google paid top brass to get to be the search engine for MySpace a short while ago. And now we're entering into direct sales - forget about just being able to advertise to the demographic, how about being able to directly sell to them like even iTunes can't?

The new big growth sector is New Media Convergence, and so long as the social networking sites hold their water as mobile phones have done we'll be seeing them becoming a more day-to-day thing. Mix up mobile phones, social networking sites, search engines, stores, even municipal WiFi and you can see the shape of teenage lives forming around the internet, whether we like it or not.

Congratulations are in order, we've made technology so mainstream that ditsy blonde teenagers are using it in their fumbling attempts to have sex with one another.

Well, there's just one problem, apparently. JP's Domain alleges that in fact a
significant number of front page stories are submitted and Dugg by the same,
small group of prolific Digg members. The blogger even identifies severa Digg
members that are apparently flooding the site with content. But is this true
manipulation? Are these Digg members simply casual acquaitances and avid Digg
fans or are they agents of an insidious plot to turn Digg into their own
exlcusive club? I'm not sure, but JP's Domain believes the issue loophole needs
to be close. The blogger writes:

"What it comes down to is there very literally is a group that controls Digg. If
you are within this group and you submit a story, you are more or less
guaranteed 10-15 (or more) automatic diggs from this group. What happens to the
people who don't have such a luxury and only get the default single vote like
everyone else? This only encourages a cycle where those who are getting votes
will continue to get more and more, as they feed each off each other and pat
each other on the back."

JP's Domain blames Digg's "Friends" feature, which allows Digg members to link
up with other Digg readers. This of course creates a system where a limited
group of people can get together on the site and combine their efforts to exert
greater control on the Digg electoral process.

In essence, they're a lobby group or a PAC (political action committee).

Interestingly enough, JP's Domain submitted the post to Digg, and it quickly
became a popular entry with 865 diggs at last count (including my own digg).
JP's Domain also posted a follow-up blog entry found href="http://jesusphreak.infogami.com/blog/what_happened_to_digg">here.

As a result of the posts, Digg co-founder Kevin Rose href="http://diggtheblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/digg-friends.html">pledged to
reform the site with a key algorithim update that is designed to select a more
diverse range of Digg submissions.

But one member of the Digg "in-crowd" was none too please with JP's Domain and
Rose's promises to reform the system, according to my old CMP pals at href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=192600648"
>InformationWeek. According to the article, Digg member " href="http://www.digg.com/users/p9s50W5k4GUD2c6">p9s50W5k4GUD2c6 ," who had
sumbitted the most stories of any Digg user, denied that he or she was rigging
the voting process and decided to leave Digg altogether.

"As a direct result of your blog this evening, I will no longer no supporting
(sic) Digg going forward. I bequeath my measly number one position to whoever
wants to reign," p9 was quoted in the InformationWeek article. "Now YOU can
spend all the time, all the effort and get stabbed in the back by fellow Diggers
-- aptly named -- and then tossed to the side by a Digg team that values toilet
paper with more worth than the core users that feed this site it's content every
day."

I swear, Web geeks are SO sensitive.

Now if you'll excuse, I'm going to get on Digg and check to see if any of the
"in-crowd" ever dugg any of my TwitchGuru stories.

For further reading, check out:
Tom's
Hardware Guide is 10 Years Old Today
and
Tom's Hardware Guide -- the book

Rahul Sood announced the acquisition on his href="http://voodoopc.blogspot.com/2006/09/project-vampire-is-about-to-
fly_28.html">blog. Sood had made news back in March when he suggested in his
blog that Dell would buy Alienware - before the Alienware
acquisition was announced - and then followed up by disclosing in his blog last
month that he and Michael Dell had discussions in 2005 about the possibility
earlier of Dell buying VoodooPC. According to Sood's href="http://voodoopc.blogspot.com/2006/08/where-theres-smoke-theres-
fire.html">blog entry on those discussions, he felt direct computer maker
wasn't a good fit for VoodooPC because Dell lacked innovation and it "lost its
way a long time ago."
Instead, VoodooPC will become part of HP. Sood wrote in his blog that he feels
HP, with its history of innovation and current management leadership, is a
better fit for his company. Sood continues:
"HP is hungry for new innovations, and if you can imagine what plugging our
corporate DNA into their labs would do - well, you get the picture. We are now
in the position to create absolutely fantastic products in all categories.
Voodoo and HP are complimentary opposites. This deadly combination of Voodoo's
gaming/luxury PC expertise and our brand DNA and influence, with HP's
innovations, scale, and leverage is going to lead to some of the most compelling
machines money can buy."

This is an interesting development for several reasons. First and foremost, I'm
surprised but glad that both Dell and HP, the top two PC makers in the world,
are taking gaming seriously. Second, I have to wonder if this will begin a trend
that will lead to fewer and fewer independent boutique computer makers that
create truly awesome gaming machines. Third, it will be interesting to see how
being part of huge multibillion dollar technology corporations will change
VoodooPC and Alienware. Will innovation be stifled or will having access to
great technical minds and lots of R&D (well, at least in HP's case) propel
the computer makers to new heights?
Whatever the case, I suppose the bottom line may be that the death of the PC was
greatly exaggerated. At my previous gig covering business IT, all we heard about
after 2001 was that PCs were a dead end business, especially after IBM sold its
PC business to Lenovo. But it's shaping up to be a fascinating time for PCs once
again and we may indeed start to see some true innovation real soon.

But it could be bad because of potential lawsuits regarding copyright issues
with music, television and feature film content. For example, the entire World
of Warcraft-themed "South Park" episode wound up on YouTube (albeit in three
separate segments) the day after it aired. Well, that episode is copyright
material for Comedy Central. But now, millions of people are able to view the
content online without paying for it (not that you'll ever prove that I did such
a thing!). That's a concern for television and movie studios, who are making
more and more cash on DVDs. So will this be a problem for GooTube?

Well, if the copyright material prevention system that Google is going to put in
place actually works, then I can see the traffic on YouTube -- and other video
sites -- declining. Even with GooTube signing agreements with Sony BMG, CBS and
Universal Music Group this week, there will be plenty of other content owners
out there that can fire lawsuits at Google, which will be a huge target for
litigation happy lawyers because of the company's financial success. And let's
not forget that there's skepticism around YouTube's ability to make money since
it is giving away content for free.

Perhaps the scariest of all issues is the so-called "safe harbor" rulings of the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which means that YouTube can claim that,
"hey, we're just hosting the video, not uploading it," and then point the finger
in the direction of whatever user uploaded the copyright material to the site.
While it's unlikely that Comedy Central will come after me and my small bank
account for posting "South Park" episodes instead of Google, it's still a
frightening prospect for YouTube members who regularly post clips of their
favorite T.V. shows.

All of these reasons, of course, led Internet entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks
owner Mark Cuban, to state that anyone that buys YouTube is "a moron." While I
don't agree with everything Cuban says, he has one of href="http://www.blogmaverick.com/">the best blogs around and his href="http://www.blogmaverick.com/2006/10/07/some-thoughts-on-youtube-and-
google/">opinions on YouTube, copyright material and the Web are quite
compelling. He gets into the href="http://www.blogmaverick.com/2006/09/29/riddle-me-this-copyright-
gurus/">implications of the DMCA and sites like YouTube. And yes, he still
thinks Google is crazy for buying YouTube.

In any event, the MySpace guys must be kicking themselves for selling out to
News Corp. for $580 million when Google buys YouTube for nearly triple that
number.

What an eventful day. TwitchGuru now has a filled out MySpace profile. Go look, and add us. We're your friends, remember. I say we now have a "filled out" profile because Rob created that back in late September, but it fell to the responsible one to actually put more than a fancy logo onto it.

Expect more pictures and suchlike, to be cross posted here of course, in the near future (as I beat Roberto into it, and get around to filling out the "Who I'd like to meet" section. Be really, really nice and I'll put you into it.)

The second, possibly more interesting, thing I picked up on today was a service called "Shelfari." The whole world seems to be about putting your life online these days, and Shelfari is an online bookshelf which is (I think) linked into Amazon. You basically find the books you have and put them on your "shelf." The social networking aspect obviously then comes from linking up with other people who read the same stuff.

Let me say here and now that there are an awful lot of Discworld readers in the world at large. In almost all of the links to profiles of "People who share some of your books" I've come across Discworld novels. Odd. Still, I can say that it's addictive stuff, adding dozens of books to your collection and racking your brains to stick in more titles. I've been coming back to it all day and adding books in spurts.

I shall be researching this Shelfari further in the hopes of doing another of my no-doubt enlightening and enthralling in-depth looks at such things which, it occurs to me now, I've not yet given a name to. It's an informal series of articles (you may recall Gamer sGate and ZYB?), but I really should give it an identifiable name. Suggestions on the back of a postcard to the usual address, or the comments box below, appreciated. With regards to Shelfari, I want to see what extra features this lot will be implementing post beta, and where they intend to make their money (IE, where's the catch.)

The other "Unnamed profile article" I'm working on concerns Games For Windows. Microsoft launched this initiative last year, lamenting about how they feel they'd almost killed PC gaming by focusing their attention on consoles (the PC gaming industry looked up, bemused, from behind its stack of gold at this proclamation.) Again, I want to know what the catch is beyond a simple logo on boxes. What's the benefit for having your game classed as a "Game For Windows"? What's the downside to not having it classed this way? A Microsoft takeover, Simpson's style?

Hrms, stuff to ponder. Well, I'm off to add more books to my Shelfari. Feel free to add me there, and feel compelled to add TwitchGuru on MySpace.

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